The Dispatch
Tuesday, July 02,
2024
Jill Biden told Vogue magazine on
Sunday that her husband “will continue to fight” to remain the Democratic
nominee for president and then, in the same breath, declared that he “will
always do the right thing for the country.” That these two statements directly
contradict each other is obvious to anyone who watched last
Thursday’s presidential debate or has paid even casual attention to the
long-accumulating public evidence of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.
And yet a number of prominent and influential Democrats,
led by those closest to the president, would have the country believe he’s just
fine. “If we’re just talking about mental acuity, let’s be fair about it,”
former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on
CNN over the weekend. “We see Joe Biden up close. We know how attuned he is
to the issues, how informed he is.” Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina told
reporters last week there’s “no better Democrat” than Biden to lead the
party into November’s general election.
Such water-carrying continues a theme in Democratic spin:
Biden is sharp and attentive in private, but not in public. This is an affront
to common sense that would be dubbed “gaslighting” if used in defense of Donald
Trump. Is Biden choosing to keep his vigilance and cunning hidden from public
view, like Phil Hartman’s Ronald
Reagan? Has he, after spending more than 50 of his 81 years on this Earth
in politics, contracted sudden-onset shyness or a kind of cognition-impairing
agoraphobia? Maybe the most straightforward answer is also the correct one:
He’s slowing down, and his decline has been accelerated by three-and-a-half
years in arguably the most stressful job known to man.
Elected Democrats and their allies in the media have made
a habit over the past decade of spotlighting their Republican counterparts’
cowardice, and they’ve been right to do so. Presented with ample opportunities
over the years to stand up to the demagogue who hijacked their party and their
movement, the vast majority of GOP lawmakers and right-wing pundits opted time
and again for political expediency, self-preservation, and the path of least
resistance. They’ve sacrificed their principles, abandoned the importance of
decency and honor, and contributed to the spread of dangerous lies—because to
do otherwise might cost them an election, their audience, or their
proximity to power.
Democrats like Pelosi have had no problem diagnosing such
gutlessness when it comes with an R next to its name. “This is about being
afraid,” she said
last summer about then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s efforts
to retroactively expunge Donald Trump’s impeachments. “These people look
pathetic.” Implicit in such criticism is the idea that her party would never
stoop to such a level.
But now faced with a collective-action problem of their
own, most leading Democrats’ moral clarity has vanished. Several
prominent
media
figures have broken
from the party
line, but the ongoing effort by Biden’s allies to shut
down legitimate questions about the president’s clearly deteriorating
faculties—as well as his ability to carry out his current job
responsibilities—is as shameless and irresponsible as just about anything Trump
and his enablers have done over the past eight years. And if Biden refuses to
step aside, it’d be an act of political selfishness surpassed in recent memory
only by Trump’s efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election.
In press releases and on cable news, the Biden campaign
has repeatedly insisted that “90 minutes does not negate three-and-a-half years
of results.” Setting aside that fewer than 4
in 10 voters approve of those “results” and only
1 in 4 believe the country is on the right track, a second term in
office is not a reward for a job well done. No, presidential elections are
forward-looking, and this coming November’s contest will be a referendum on
whether the incumbent can effectively do the job for another four years. He
cannot.
Discussing last week’s debate, around The
Dispatch’s office and with friends beyond work, we’ve been struck by how
many people—how many of us—have dealt with a situation like the one facing the
Bidens. Anyone who’s witnessed cognitive decline in elderly friends and
relatives has heard the phrase “good days and bad days.” It comes up when loved
ones are discussing a potential move to assisted-living facilities, or when
they’re making the difficult decision to take the car keys from someone who
shouldn’t be driving.
Joe Biden, by all accounts, has good days and bad days.
On good days, he is reportedly
“dependably engaged” between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. On bad days, he wanders off, or freezes up, or reads the word “pause” aloud from
his teleprompter. For those who have tuned into a handful of Biden’s public
appearances in recent years, his inability on Thursday to string together
multiple sentences—and his
false claim that no U.S. troops have died during his presidency—came as no
surprise.
Republicans have certainly exploited such “senior
moments” for their own partisan purposes, but that does not magically render
them unimportant or irrelevant—quite the opposite. World leaders reportedly
have serious worries about Biden’s ability to keep up with discussions
during international summits, and members of Congress from both parties have described
a noticeably slower version of the president in recent months.
Some Democrats, like Rep. Ro Khanna of California, have dismissed
such concerns by pointing to the people who would be surrounding Biden
in a second term. But as our colleague Kevin Williamson points
out, we elect presidents in this country, not prime ministers. And with a host
of new challenges and the threat to Pax Americana arguably
the highest it’s been in decades, the United States needs—and deserves—a leader
who can be reliably counted on to answer those 3 a.m. calls.
Donald Trump—for
too many reasons to
count—is not that leader, either. Yet if Biden stubbornly decides to plow
ahead, the former president will almost assuredly find himself back in the
White House come January. A CBS
News poll conducted after last week’s debate found that 72 percent of
registered voters believe Biden does not have the “mental and cognitive health”
to serve as president, and that 46 percent of Democratic voters believe
Biden should not continue his 2024 campaign. Election analyst Nate Silver’s latest
model shows Biden with just a 28 percent chance of securing another term,
and he predicts
that figure “will get worse” for the president in the coming weeks and months.
***
Democrats have been raising the alarm for eight years
about the distinct threat Trump poses to the country and the constitutional
order. They were right in 2016. They were right in 2020. And they’re right
today.
But party leaders are not behaving in a manner consistent
with those dire warnings. If the stakes of this election genuinely are as high
as people like
Nancy Pelosi say they are—that the future of democracy itself is in
peril—Joe Biden must relinquish the Democratic nomination for president and
allow himself to be replaced by someone capable of campaigning for the
presidency and running the executive branch of the federal government.
Such maneuvering is certainly not without risks. Swapping
Biden out now would require Democratic leaders and the party’s boosters in the
media to admit, explicitly or implicitly, that they lied to the American
people—for years—about the president’s condition. And if Biden is not fit to
run for reelection, a good-faith argument could be made that he’s not fit to
serve as president right now, either. There’s also no guarantee that the
candidate who emerges from extended party infighting at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago this summer—with whom we expect we would have profound
policy disagreements—will be able to pull together the increasingly fractured
coalition necessary to keep Trump from the White House.
But that is almost beside the point.
Admitting that the current situation is untenable—and
trying to do something about it—would represent a small act of political
courage in an era that is desperately crying out for some. With increasingly
few exceptions, politicians and pundits in Washington haven’t truly leveled
with the American people—about Biden and Trump, about debt and deficits, about
the separation of powers and the proper role of government—in years.
Acknowledging that an 81-year-old man in clear cognitive decline should not be
in charge of the most powerful military in world history would be a start.
And if Biden is truly intent on doing the right thing for
the country as the first lady claimed, he has a difficult—but obvious—decision
to make.
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